Category:Joseph and Aseneth (text)

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Joseph and Aseneth (see Online Text) is an ancient narrative now included in collections of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, and Jewish-Hellenistic literature.

• This page is edited by Meredith J.C. Warren, Sheffield University, Sheffield, UK.

Overview

Joseph and Aseneth is an apocryphal expansion of Genesis 41:45. In Genesis, Aseneth is described as the wife of the patriarch Joseph and as the daughter of Potiphera the priest of On. Joseph and Aseneth is a text in two parts. Part I, chapters 1–21, details Aseneth’s meeting of and eventual marriage to Joseph. This section also contains the remarkable apocalyptic scene where Aseneth entertains an angelic being in her chamber and emerges transformed into a bride fit for Joseph. Part II, chapters 22–29, describes the couple’s adventures after their marriage, which includes an assassination and kidnapping plot orchestrated by Pharaoh’s son.

Date and Provenance

Most scholars categorize the tale as Jewish in origin (although its preservation is owed to Christians) and favour a date in the Hellenistic period, from the first century BCE to the second century CE. An Egyptian provenance is likely given the setting of the tale in Heliopolis. That being said, the date and provenance of this text are hotly debated. Major scholars and their proposed dates and provenance are provided in the chart below. More detail concerning their opinions follows.

Scholar (Publication dates): Provenance Proposed, Date Proposed

Pierre Batiffol (1889): Asia Minor, fifth century CE

Marc Philonenko (1968): Egypt, 100CE–115/117 CE

Gideon Bohak (1996): Egypt, mid-second century BCE

Christoph Burchard (1965–1996): Egypt, 100 CE–116 CE

Randall D. Chesnutt (1995): Egypt, 100 CE–115/117 CE

Ross Kraemer (1998): Syria, third century CE at the earliest

Rivka Nir (2012): Syria, third to fourth centuries CE

Pierre Batiffol published the first critical edition of Joseph and Aseneth. He saw the tale as a metaphor: Joseph symbolized Christ and Aseneth the church or virginity. Viewing the whole account as a description of Christian initiation, Batiffol represented the consensus for more than half a century.

Christoph Burchard represents the current majority opinion that Joseph and Aseneth is a Hellenistic Jewish text of Egyptian provenance. It is now widely agreed that our text was originally composed in Greek (Burchard, Gesemmalte, 302). Burchard has published a critical edition of the long version of Joseph and Aseneth, widely used by current scholars.

The dating of Joseph and Aseneth is necessarily enmeshed with the supposed location of composition. Primarily because of the location of the characters in the narrative itself, and because of known Jewish-Hellenistic activity in Egypt, many scholars, including Burchard, have supported Egypt as the original location. That Joseph and Aseneth shares linguistic and stylistic elements in common with the Septuagint also supports this claim.

Those who support an Egyptian provenance observe that in doing so, the dating becomes more concrete; the Jewish community in Egypt (the supposed authors of this work) faced major upheaval after 117 CE when there was a revolt and again in 135 CE when Hadrian outlawed circumcision. Burchard suggests that the community would therefore be unlikely to produce a text with such a positive view of non-Jews when relations with gentiles were so hostile and therefore the text cannot be much later than the first third of the second century.

Gideon Bohak, in his book “Joseph and Aseneth” and the Jewish Temple at Heliopolis, argues for a much earlier date than most scholars propose. Based on the idea of Egyptian provenance, Bohak argues that Joseph and Aseneth was written as an apologia for the Temple at Heliopolis, founded by Onias IV. Emphasizing our text’s use of the term “City of Refuge” (Joseph and Aseneth 15.6) Bohak draws parallels with various texts—including Isaiah, Josephus, and others—that claim the priests sought refuge in Heliopolis. Bohak interprets the imagery of the bees and the honeycomb in terms of the concerns of the Oniad priests. The colours used to describe the bees, claims Bohak, are actually descriptive more of the clothing worn by priests in the Bible. Thus, the bees represent the exiled priests arriving at Heliopolis to set up a new place of worship. The honeycomb is that Temple, rebuilt in their City of Refuge—that is, Heliopolis. This analysis puts the date of Joseph and Aseneth to the mid-second century BCE, a date at least one hundred years earlier than most other scholars date it.

Marc Philonenko, to whom we owe the current critical edition of the short recension, suggests on the other hand that the milieu for Joseph and Aseneth is rather a rural or semi-urban environment in which Jews and Gentiles would have been likely to intermingle. Because of this familiarity, Philonenko proposed that Joseph and Aseneth was primarily composed for the purpose of proselytizing. Philonenko’s suggestion of a non-urban setting has been criticized, as urban life would perhaps have been more conducive to complex religious ideas such as those presented in Joseph and Aseneth.

Ross Kraemer’s monograph, When Aseneth Met Joseph, questions the assumptions upon which the dating schema has thus far been based and points out that Egyptian provenance is far from proven, preferring herself a Syrian place of origin for the text. She points out that our first textual evidence for Joseph and Aseneth is from the 4th century when it is referred to in other manuscripts. Thus, she proposes a date of the 3rd century CE at the earliest and also suggests that a Christian hand could have been responsible for the tale given the affinities it shares with Syrian Christian imagery of that era.

Nir, building on Kraemer’s work, likewise proposes a Christian provenance for the text and argues for a later dating of the 3rd–4th centuries CE. Her conclusions are based on comparisons with Syrian Christian liturgy, ethics, and ritual practices, including baptism, eucharist, and marriage. She views Aseneth’s honeycomb meal as the eucharist and her washing after her visit with the angelic being as a symbol for baptism.

Manuscript Traditions

Joseph and Aseneth’s manuscript tradition is complex. Both a long and a short recension are extant, with most recent scholarship favouring the longer text as the older version, while the short text is assumed to be the product of later redactive activity, although Kraemer notably argues that the shorter version is the original and that the longer represents an expansion of it.

Currently the text exists in more than 70 manuscripts in many different languages. The oldest of these is a Syriac text dated to the 6th century CE (Burchard, Gesammelte, 298). The manuscripts can be arranged in four groups labelled a through d, each descended from a corresponding more ancient group, which in turn are denoted using Greek letters: α, β, ζ, and δ.

Group a is made up of six Greek manuscripts, including a text from the Vatican Library from around the 11th Century. It is this family of texts on which Batiffol based his text (Burchard, Gesammelte, 298).

Group b includes the oldest manuscript—6th century Syriac—as well as others, ranging from an Armenian text from the 6th or 7th century to a Rumanian manuscript dating from the 17th century, as well as four Greek manuscripts from the 15th–17th centuries (Burchard, Gesammelte, 298). This group yields the long version favoured by Burchard and the current majority of scholars.

Group c contains only 3 manuscripts, all of which are Greek. The oldest of these is only as old as the 17th century.

Lastly, group d is made up of three texts. Two of the texts are Greek, one from the 11th century and the other the 15th; the third is Serbo-Slavonic and dates to the 15th century (Burchard, Gesammelte, 298). The d manuscript family represents the so-called short version favoured by Philonenko, Kraemer, and Nir.

There is some limited consensus with regard to the ancestry of these families of texts. First, α appears to be the product of a 10th-century, Byzantine redactor (Burchard, Gesammelte, 298). Second, b is agreed by most—even Philonenko—to be “very old” (Burchard, Gesammelte, 300). However, Burchard argues that this text is probably independent from both a and d as it often presents less problematic readings than a and d (Burchard, Gesammelte, 300), whereas Philonenko proposes a linear development of the text families.

Philonenko holds that δ was developed into the β form at an early stage, which in turn was edited into ζ. A version of that family, a c text, became the originator of the α family. Burchard, sees δ as a text shortened in the 11th century with common ancestry to α. This older common hypothetical text, αδ, he suggests was written in the 9th or 10th centuries as part of a Byzantine Renaissance (Burchard, Gesammelte, 300). Burchard rejects Philonenko’s idea that the manuscript families developed in a straight line since there is such disagreement between the versions they produced. Burchard also notes that the idea of a unified b family has yet to be fully supported, since identifying familial resemblances is complicated by the fact that the texts are in various languages. The Syriac, Armenian, and Latin versions found in b are cited as the “major witnesses to its oldest form” (Burchard, Gesemmalte, 301).

Those who support a Jewish milieu for composition argue that it seems likely, given the topic, that Joseph and Aseneth was composed with a Jewish audience in mind, although those who support a Christian milieu point out that the story it records is completely absent from rabbinic discussion—a surprising fact given the number of extant manuscripts.

As is current custom in scholarship, the versification in this entry follows Burchard’s long version; Philonenko’s versification is different.

Language of Composition

Although early explorations of Joseph and Aseneth suggested that Hebrew was the language of composition, it is now widely agreed that our text was originally composed in Greek (Burchard, Gesammelte, 302). Because of the complexity and distinctiveness of the phrases and vocabulary used to the Greek language, and its similarities with parts of the Septuagint, most scholars disregard Hebrew as a candidate for original language (Burchard, “Joseph and Aseneth,” 181; Humphrey, Joseph and Aseneth, 31). There is some dependence on an Old Greek version of the Bible; much of the imagery in Joseph and Aseneth shares verbal similarity with the Septuagint version of the Psalms, Song of Songs, and Judges (Humphrey, Joseph and Aseneth, 32). Joseph and Aseneth’s affinity with the Septuagint can be best seen in the simpler, koine style of Greek used by the author, as well as the marked “Semitic tone” of the writing, suggesting an author familiar with Hebrew and/or Aramaic or perhaps simply an imitation of the style of holy writings in general (Burchard, Gesammelte, 306). Burchard notes that Semiticized koine may simply reflect common linguistic usage rather than conscious imitation of the Septuagint (Burchard, Gesammelte, 307) and therefore any assumption concerning Joseph and Aseneth’s imitation of the Septuagint must be examined carefully.

Synopsis

Pentephres’ (as the text, and the LXX, calls the biblical character Potiphera) daughter Aseneth is described as radiantly beautiful, eighteen years old, and a virgin who hates all men. Aseneth spends all her time hiding in her tower worshipping the gods of the Egyptians with her seven virgin attendants. A description of her tower and the house and its grounds is also given.

Aseneth meets Joseph when he comes to Pentephres’ villa while in Heliopolis to collect grain during a time of surplus. Aseneth is in the main building to greet her parents when she first hears of Joseph’s impending visit, and at first she refuses to meet him, despite her father’s assurances that Joseph is both a godly virgin and powerful. When Joseph arrives, Aseneth spies him from a window of her tower. She falls in love with him instantly and gives a prayerful lament about her foolishness. She decides to meet Joseph but when she goes to kiss him, she is rebuffed by Joseph, who tells her that he does not touch or kiss strange women because of his piety. Instead, Joseph prays for her to become a worshipper of his God.

Upset by this, Aseneth retires to her tower to mourn and fast. She puts on sackcloth and ashes and throws away the statuettes of her gods. She also prays to Joseph’s God that he will accept her as a worshipper over three long soliloquies.

The next section, beginning at chapter 14, contains Aseneth’s apocalyptic vision of a man from heaven described as glowing and fiery in appearance. This heavenly visitor tells Aseneth that her prayers have been accepted by God and that her name is written in the book of the living in heaven; she is also pronounced to be, now, a fit bride for Joseph. The visitor produces a honeycomb, and while feeding it to Aseneth, reverses the negative imagery previously used to malign Aseneth; whereas until that time she had been one who ate “bread of strangulation and [drunk] … a cup of insidiousness and anoint[ed] herself with ointment of destruction” (8.5-7), she is here declared to be like Joseph, who had always “bless [ed] with his mouth the living God and [eaten] blessed bread of life and [drank] a blessed cup of immortality and anoint[ed] himself with blessed ointment of incorruptibility” (8:5–7).

At this, the bees, dressed in gold and purple, swarm up around Aseneth but do not sting her. Instead, they build a new honeycomb on Aseneth’s lips. Some bees die while others are returned to heaven. Those who died are brought back to life and sent to live in Aseneth’s garden. The honeycomb which Aseneth bit is made whole again, and proceeds to burst into flames. The visitor leaves her transformed in appearance. She now has a glowing aura and is even more radiantly beautiful than before.

When she next meets Joseph, he accepts her as his bride and they are married in a ceremony officiated by Pharaoh himself.

Part two describes an attack on Aseneth orchestrated by Pharaoh’s son. Motivated by jealousy, he creates a plan to kill Joseph and steal Aseneth for himself. He attempts to recruit Joseph’s brothers to help him; most of the brothers reject his plan and warn him not to pursue it, but Gad and Dan are manipulated into participating. In the end, during the attack, Benjamin throws a rock at Pharaoh’s son’s head and fatally wounds him. The other brothers slay thousands of men with swords. Aseneth, for her part, prays to God who turns her attackers’ swords to dust. Gad and Dan are saved by Aseneth from being killed in retaliation by Joseph’s other brothers; she piously admonishes her brothers-in-law against meeting evil with evil.

Having lost his only son, Pharaoh, upon dying from old age in a kind of epilogue, leaves his kingdom to Joseph, who rules for 48 years.

Theology

Joseph and Aseneth is a very complex text and cannot readily be said to have an over-arching theological message, but several themes can be identified.

Part I focuses on the transformation Aseneth initiates in order to wed Joseph. Here, despite her admirable virginity and great beauty, Aseneth’s unfamiliarity with Joseph’s God renders her unsuitable for marriage. Both Aseneth’s and Joseph’s virginity is emphasized at several points in the narrative. Even after Joseph and Aseneth become betrothed, the text makes it clear that they do not sleep together before their marriage (21.1). However, 21.9 is clear that Joseph and Aseneth did not maintain chastity after their marriage, but rather had two children, Manasseh and Ephraim.

Joseph and Aseneth uses the language of death and life to contrast Aseneth’s association with her Egyptian gods with her new association with Joseph’s God. During her transformation, Aseneth is described as having her name written in the Book of the Living in Heaven (15.4) whereas in 8.5, Joseph accuses her of “bless[ing] with her mouth dead and dumb idols, and eat[ing] from their table bread of strangulation and drink[ing] from their libation a cup of insidiousness and anoint[ing] herself with ointment of destruction.” Burchard sees the language of cup, bread, and ointment as referring to actual ritual practices to which Jews must adhere to find favour with God (Burchard, “Joseph and Aseneth, 191). This meal formula is the centre of the vast majority of the various debates on this text. Regardless of its meaning, language of eating and anointing is used to delineate between the godly and everyone else. Those who partake have life, immortality, and incorruption.

Aseneth is given a fair amount of agency in this text. Rather than being proselytized by Joseph, Aseneth takes matters into her own hands, praying on her own behalf and taking the necessary steps to commune directly with heaven through the heavenly visitor. Joseph prays for her, but then is absent for the entirety of her experience.

The mourning, fasting, washing, and changing of clothes performed by Aseneth could represent some custom of initiation into Judaism, but no scholar has satisfactorily presented convincing evidence of existing rituals matching these. Nir and Kraemer point to Christian initiation rituals as more fitting comparisons. The climax of part I is in Aseneth’s so-called conversion scene, where the heavenly being describes her as a City of Refuge for those who likewise choose to affiliate themselves with God. In this scene, Aseneth is fed a portion of heavenly honeycomb. Comparisons have been made by several scholars to the eucharist, pointing to this scene as evidence of Christian authorship. This honey is said to be the food of angels, which Aseneth shares. Baptism is conspicuously absent unless one counts—as Nir does—Aseneth’s washing in 18.7–9, which Aseneth does to wash the tear-streaked ash from her face (and only her face). In Burchard’s long version, Aseneth does not actually accomplish this washing since she catches sight of her radiance in the bowl of water and is afraid that she might wipe it away with the water.

In Part II, Aseneth is less prominent as a character as her brothers-in-law face ethical quandaries. The theme in this section is that the godly do not return violence with violence or hate with hate, and that God protects those who ask for aid, as Aseneth does. In this section, Aseneth behaves in the ideal manner: while her brothers-in-law seek retaliation for the attack, Aseneth persuades them to remember clemency.

God is mentioned several times in Aseneth’s and Joseph’s prayers to him. God in Joseph and Aseneth is both creator and maintainer of the world. God is described as a father who protects those who cleave to him and who hates those who do not. Aseneth’s acceptance by God illustrates how willing God is to welcome those who repent. As Burchard notes, God is not described as a giver of law or a recipient of sacrifice (Burchard, “Joseph and Aseneth,” 190).

The cosmos featured in this narrative is complex. The waters carry the earth, upon which rest the heavens. In the waters below a sea monster lives, which Aseneth fears will devour her (12.11). A “wild old lion” is described as persecuting Aseneth, and it is he who would hand her over to the sea monster. The lion is described as the father of the Egyptian gods (12.9). Burchard reads this lion as the devil, although the term is not mentioned in the text (Burchard, “Joseph and Aseneth,” 190). Angels live in heaven, like Aseneth’s heavenly visitor. Honey is food for the angels and God’s chosen ones. Heaven is a place of rest for these elect (8.9; 15.7; 22.13).

Idolatry is held up as the main difference between those who worship God and those who do not. Aseneth is virtuous in all other ways but her choice of worship. Thus, God does not sustain those who worship idols, and it is Aseneth’s choice to worship God that gives her life and immortality. Rather than an historic “fall” from which all humanity must be redeemed, Joseph and Aseneth presents a pair of choices—two ways of life from which to select. As Burchard points out, the text does not divide the world into opposing realms, one reigned by God and the other Satan (Burchard, “Joseph and Aseneth,” 191). However, neither does the text remove Aseneth and Joseph from their pagan environment after Aseneth’s transformation and marriage; there is no mention of a godly community which segregates itself from the world at large. Indeed, Pharaoh is the one to perform Joseph and Aseneth’s marriage (21.2–7).

In short, whether one describes Joseph and Aseneth as a Jewish or a Christian text, the theological concepts and themes depicted in the text are complex and provide a different view of either religious tradition. It avoids mention of the Law and places emphasis on personal piety, but likewise avoids explicit mention of key Christian concepts, instead presenting an ambiguous picture of religious ideas in the early few centuries of the ancient Mediterranean.

References

• P. Batiffol. Le Livre de la Prière d’Aséneth. Paris: E. Leroux, 1889.
• Gideon Bohak. Joseph and Aseneth and the Jewish Temple in Heliopolis. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996.
• Christoph Burchard. “Joseph and Aseneth.” Pages 177-247 in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. Edited by James H. Charlesworth. Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1983.
• C. Burchard. Gesammelte Studien zu Joseph und Aseneth. Leiden: Brill, 1996.
• Randall D. Chesnutt. From Death to Life: Conversion in Joseph and Aseneth. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995.
• Edith M. Humphrey. Joseph and Aseneth. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000.
• Ross Kraemer. When Aseneth Met Joseph: A Late Antique Tale of the Biblical Patriarch and His Egyptian Wife, Reconsidered. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
• Rivkah Nir. Joseph and Aseneth: A Christian Book. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012.
• Marc Philonenko. Joseph et Aséneth. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1968.
• Angela Standhartinger. “From Fictional Text to Socio-Historical Context: Some Considerations from a Textcritical Perspective on Joseph and Aseneth.” Pages 303–318 in Society of Biblical *Literature 1996 Seminar Papers. Atlanta, GA: SBL, 1996.
• Meredith J.C. Warren. “Like Dew From Heaven: Honeycomb, Religious Identity, and Transformation in Joseph and Aseneth.” Masters thesis, McGill University, 2006.
• Meredith J. C. Warren. “A Robe Like Lightning: Clothing Changes and Identification in Joseph and Aseneth” in Alicia Batten, Carly Daniel-Hughes, and Kristi Upson-Saia eds., Dressing Jews and Christians in Antiquity. Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014.
• Joseph and Aseneth / Patricia Ahearne-Kroll / In: The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism (2010 Collins / Harlow), dictionary, 826-828
• / [[]] / In: The Anchor Bible Dictionary (1992 Freedman), dictionary,

External links

• Wikipedia